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Why is Mesquite a major location in a Swedish video game about Nazis?

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As suburbs of Dallas go, Mesquite is not a city you expect to see or hear in movies, shows or video games. Yet in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Mesquite is a major location with significance to the game's story -- a surprise, given that the big-budget action game was developed in Sweden.

Furthermore, Wolfenstein II is an extremely violent game all about killing Nazis. It takes place in an alternate history in which America surrendered to the Germans during World War II. The protagonist, B.J. Blazkowicz, works with a resistance group fighting to take America back by whatever means necessary. So again: Why Mesquite?

The answer might not surprise anyone familiar with Dallas-Fort Worth's game development history, but it's an Easter egg that is meaningful to Blazkowicz as a character.

Very mild spoilers for Wolfenstein II follow.

A screenshot from 'Wolfenstein II'

/Bethesda

On a trip from Roswell, New Mexico, to Galveston, Texas, Blazkowicz makes a detour to his childhood home in Mesquite. There, you see flashbacks of his childhood on the farm, growing up under a Jewish mother and a deeply racist father. Mesquite is the place that made the in-fiction character who he is by the time he's fighting for his country.

Mesquite is also the literal birthplace of Blazkowicz. The character was created in 1992 by developer id Software for the hit computer game Wolfenstein 3D. At the time, id Software's offices were in Mesquite, though the studio is now based in Richardson.

This new Wolfenstein is developed by Swedish game developer Machine Games, but id Software's DNA still runs throughout it. I reached out to Machine Games and got confirmation from the game's creative director, Jens Matthies, that the Mesquite connection is intentional.

"Yes, MachineGames' version of Wolfenstein was conceived when we visited id Software's office in Mesquite, TX in the summer of 2010," Matthies says via e-mail. "We thought it would be fitting to make Mesquite B.J. Blazkowicz's place of birth."

This alternate universe version of Mesquite seems to contain a lot more farmland than the Mesquite of today, but hey, the game takes place in 1961.